Aha! Seed Catalogs!

The 2013 harvest sits in a warehouse somewhere, in a number of small paper envelopes, waiting to be plucked up and mailed across the country to my little greenhouse.

I need only check a little box on an order form and this bounty will be sent to me, via the United States Postal Service. And the seeds will be placed into little plastic cells in sterile soiless mix, and watered, and heated, and cooled, and watered again.

The catalogs have been dripping in, one at a time, since about Thanksgiving. They stacked up on the edge of the desk until they toppled over, and then I put then in the seed cabinet. The empty seed cabinet. That will fill to bursting in a very short period of time. A small entry in a catalog changes into an envelope, and the envelope changes into a seed flat, or a dozen seed flats, and the seed flats turn into a row, or a dozen rows. And the rows are harvested and put into boxes, and the boxes fill up the back of a truck.

I’m ordering seeds based on what has done well in the past, and that judgment is based on records I kept last year. That’s when the harvest shrinks back down again, from boxes filling the back of a truck to a single cell on a spreadsheet.